Amateur Electronics

Tag Archives: fablab

There are so many ways to tell the time. DIYers have been doing clocks since the Ancient Egypt (obelisks lacked portability, thou). Every modern maker has a clock amongst her first projects. I have done some myself, including a fibonacci clock, a wordclock with a fancy green matrix effect and an unreleased project that hopefully will see the light someday soon.

But recently I came back to the idea behind the wordclock before, to extend it in different ways:

Replace the ATMega328P with an ESP8266 (NTP support and user interaction)

Smaller sizes (8×8 LED matrices)

Smaller PCB, less buttons

Add buzzer for alarms

Replace the 3D printed part with a wooden grid cut in laser

Completely closed enclosure, better presentation

Fix some issues with the original board (like the lack of a beefy capacitor across the LED matrix power lines).

it’s been a while (ok, more than a whole year) since my last post. I could say I’ve been busy and it’d be true but I regret myself not writting here for so long… Anyway if you want to know what I’ve been doing just visit my family blog (only in spanish, sorry).

Blue footed boobies (yes, I know). Nothing to do with this blog but part of our family trip.

My idea now is to revisit old projects, the ones I’ve been working on for the last 18 months and even older, and also to write about new projects I’m involved right now. Good bye chronological order.

The months prior to our travel to South America I was working on some collaborative projects related to Barcelona’s network of public fablabs (named Ateneus), and here I am to share with you one of those projects, not only because I found the initiative interesting and the project worth sharing, but because it was cool to see how a 1.8×3 meters CNC mill (that’s 5.9×9.8 feet working area, for you imperialists) will remove the copper from a 2x3cm clad.